Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (13 page)

"Godless heathen!" the lady shrieked from her window, and I
could see it in her eyes, even from across the street, the rawness from
whatever memories the cracks in her broken mind had uncovered.
"Filthy godless heathen!" she screamed. No one responded. The crowd
was thoroughly silent and awkward in the spew.

"That would be me," I finally said. "I'm the filthy godless
heathen."

"No," said another, "I am."

"No, I'm the filthy godless heathen," laughed another, and soon
there we all were, a bunch of filthy godless heathens laughing until the
bus came and took us away.

By that time I'd been in Oxford for half a year, studying at a
college that was separate from the actual famous university but that
shared the same territory as well as a few of its professors just the same.
One such professor was a local magistrate. I cannot for the life of me
remember what she taught us. All I remember is that it would have
helped my learning process if she'd have once bothered to put out her
cigarette. I coughed as loud as a lawn mower during her tutorials.

By then my lungs were hardly more than two used teabags anyway, considering my parents smoked so much that over time streaks of nicotine would stain our ceiling like the splatter pattern at the scene
of a slaughter.

I tell you, the British must be tough, because their collective secondhand cloud is so thick I'm surprised the whole country doesn't
develop its own atmospheric ring like the planet Saturn or something.
I was there barely a week before I got hit with a bout of bronchitis
that nearly ripped the ribs right out of my chest. The doctor told me
to stay out of the pubs, because that's where most of the smoke was.
Stay out of the pubs? He may as well have told me to stop breathingwhich, come to think of it, I almost did.

I stopped smoking myself when I was thirteen-one of the last
times I ever acted with complete conviction. I remember that last
cigarette perfectly. By then I'd been smoking four years and had-I
swear to God-developed a pack-a-day habit. That night I sat on my
friend's front steps inhaling this last cigarette like it could save my life,
rather than prematurely snuff it out.

In fact, it seems that all my past last times were better than these
recent ones. Here I am in England, with a fist full of prawn-flavored
potato chips, trying to appreciate it being my last time here, wondering when I'll get all awash in sentiment and start worrying about losing my job along with my toehold in the world of reality, when all of
a sudden I remember what Grant told me.

"Hollis, you don't live in the world of reality anyway," he said.
"You live in the world of possibility."

He's right, I guess, so what the hell-why not make this the last
time I think in terms of last times?

KIM'S HUSBAND, EDDIE, THE LAND BARON, is under siege by two crusty
drug addicts who aren't even his tenants, which I find alarming given
the contingent of dubious suspects who do actually occupy his rental
properties. Granted, though, most of them are only trouble if they
don't take their medication.

Take Octavia, who moved in last April and respectfully paid her
rent on time for the first month, then promptly refused to fork over
another penny seeing as how, she claimed, the house was filled with
poisonous gas and all, which really put her out health-wise, so the very
least she could expect in return was rent-free living for, like, ever. And
by the way, she was happy to do him the favor of destroying the interior, too, by leaving the carpet looking and smelling like it was used to
transport rotting corpses to their shallow graves.

It turns out Octavia wasn't very regimented with her medication.
Now, thankfully, she is gone. It took four months, a marshal, and a
magistrate (who scoffed at Eddie's late fees) to close the book on that
fiasco. But the drama doesn't end there. At another property, Eddie
has two other tenants he's in the process of evicting-a lesbian couple
whose ex-husbands live down the street from them in another house.
The one girl is a Denny's waitress and fairly bearable, while the other
is a sluggish, drug-addled walrus who parties with the exes while her
girlfriend is at work.

You'd think Eddie wouldn't involve himself, but Eddie always
involves himself. He's a big walking bundle of open arms, I tell you, and I'd worry about him if I hadn't personally seen him get dragged
behind a ton of horses and come up smiling. Seriously, the beatings,
kicks, and scars-both emotional and physical-he's absorbed in his
life would have hardened others into a small ball of bitterness, but
Eddie always emerges bigger of heart and more open of arms. I marvel
at him. I really do. I figure he makes a good role model, which is why
I want to buy an investment property, too, while my credit report still
says I'm employed. Eddie agreed and offered to show me the ropes.

Right now he is currently confronting the ex-husbands of his errant
tenants, trying to run their petty drug-dealing asses out of the neighborhood. These two guys are known, believe it or not, as "Boobs" and
"Wiener," the former nicknamed for his shirtless sagging man-tits, and
the latter for his simple mental disposition. You might believe that two
miscreants who go by Boobs and Wiener wouldn't pose such a threat,
but they do. For example, since it's now established that the lesbian
couple is moving, Eddie is showing the property to other possible tenants, which at first he had to do while Boobs and Wiener hung around
out front, spitting on anyone ambling up the walk.

Now, after an encounter that afforded Eddie an opportunity to
brandish his industrial stun gun and chase them through the neighborhood, they stay on their porch a few yards away and simply scream from
there. This does not seem to bother Eddie in the least. Me? If I faced
this, I'd want to tunnel my way underground to get away from them.
Those two terrify me simply for what they represent, which is constant
confrontation, and I hate confrontation. It produces an anxiety in me
that is so severe I actually, on occasion, foam at the mouth. That's about the closest I can do to feigning an epileptic attack, which is how I've
seen Lary successfully deflect oncoming panhandlers.

In fact, I have had people lie to me, all big-eyed and earnest, right
to my face ("I swear, the panties in the glove compartment belong to
my mother"), and normally I'm so mortified for them that I'll blather
forth all kinds of opportunities for them to save themselves rather
than witness their shame at being busted. I hate that about myself. I
wish I could be more like Kim, who has a gaze as level as a laser and
who is impervious to the squirming of those who have been confronted with their own idiocy.

I have been on the other end of that gaze. "I swear," I told her
when I was a drug-addled college student and we were roommates on
campus, "he was just sleeping there in bed with me, that's all. Nothing
happened. He has a girlfriend, for chrissakes." Kim did not have to say
a word; she just leveled her look on me and kept it there. I squirmed
like a caterpillar under a pin but never came clean. Still, though, I
remember how it felt to be confronted with my own idiocy, thank
God, because by now I've learned that if we're not strong enough to
confront the idiocy in others, we're less likely to face it in ourselves.

So Boobs and Wiener continue to scream at Eddie, but at least
they do it from their own porch now, as opposed to the sidewalk in
front of Eddie's property. Kept at that distance, those two do seem a
lot less sinister, powerless even, seeing as how their only power lies in
their ability to put people at unease. Boobs braves a few steps forward,
but Eddie keeps him at bay with a simple wave of his stun gun, an
effective reminder that he, for one, is not afraid of confrontation.

I DID NOT SET OUT YESTERDAY TO SOLVE A BANK HEIST. Nope. When
I woke up in the morning, my only plan was to buy an investment
property as Eddie advised, because it's not like I can rely on my 401 K
for retirement-a 401K that is empty now, actually, but no big deal.

So I want to invest in something other than stocks, and something more reliable than, for example, the savings plan of my friend
Wes, who years ago figured he'd found a rare penny and could retire
on its proceeds once he alerted Sotheby's of his discovery. The last
time I saw Wes, he was literally shirtless and barefoot, conducting
a yard sale from his girlfriend's driveway. Not that I have anything
against that. My own mother took to hawking boxes of picked-over
discards at a swap meet once her job building bombs for the government finally fell apart. She made ends meet by selling crap out of the
back of an old VW van. She wore a coin belt and everything. I'd never
seen her so happy. Eventually she got good at recognizing the occasional gem among the rubbish, such as the Italian Pezzato figurine she
gave me. She found it in a box of broken coffee saucers, a perfect little
jewel discovered among the rubbish.

Which aptly describes my real-estate investment technique:
Either find the gem among the rubbish or find the rubbish among the
gems. Lately my method has been to search out the ugliest house on
the block, and yesterday I had one all picked out-a tiny brick shit
box that sat like a little boil in a neighborhood of ostentatious new-
builts, and if there's anything I can't resist, it's an ugly house sitting squat among its pastel-painted neighbors. The house I live in now is
like that, barely bigger than the trailers that sit in our driveway, with
aluminum grandma awnings and a bathroom smaller than my bed. I'd
initially bought it as my first rental property until the crotchety neighbor next door stalker-called me twenty times one day to bitch about
the "bad element" that renters bring and how I needed to live there
myself in order to keep the neighborhood from going "completely to
the pooper."

"All right," I finally sighed, as I'm a pushover for senile old porcupines. So I moved in and Dot and I talk across the fence fairly
often now. She forgets she already told me the story about how the
lady who lived here before me died of breast cancer twenty years ago
at the age of forty-two, so she recounts it to me again and again,
and I always listen to her patiently, pretty much. Some mornings I
still catch her in her bath slippers in the street trying to pick up industrial trace material that had fallen off the contractor trucks headed to
the new development down the street. Today our houses are among
the last holdouts in a now-hot neighborhood-the few that are not
torn down and not improved.

So this brick shit shack I had picked out met all this same criteria. It was a veritable shoo-in until, for some reason, I was drawn to
another house entirely. It was not the ugliest house on the block, but
rather one of the better scraps among the rubbish; a potentially cute
but ancient shotgun shack with hardly any black-widow spiders in the
meter well or used condoms in the yard or any of the other things I
usually regard as good-luck tokens. I pretty much appreciate anything that will scare off other buyers and allow the house to sit there and
so confound the seller that they'll piss with happiness at the sound of
my offer. The first house I ever bought stood a few doors down from
where the police had recently found a severed human head in a plastic
sack. So you can imagine the bargains to be had on that street. But
this house had none of that and it still spoke to me, which made me
suspicious.